


hearing that noise (was my first ever feeling)

by constellationsofsentences



Series: all these pictures of you [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Coming Out, M/M, idk this is just me trying to give jonathan a bit of personality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 07:01:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20111053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellationsofsentences/pseuds/constellationsofsentences
Summary: Steve shrugs. “What about you? Take any good photos of any girls lately?” He quirks his mouth as he says it, but there’s a hardness to the thin press of his lips. He looks at Jonathan, and it’s a challenge.Jonathan punches him.There’s a pause. Heavy breathing. Then:“Damn,” Steve says. “You’ve got better.”





	hearing that noise (was my first ever feeling)

**Author's Note:**

> title from lost in the supermarker by the clash

Steve swaggers up to him on the fourth day Jonathan’s back in Hawkins.

“Hey,” he says. They’re standing in the middle of the arcade parking lot; Steve must have been the one to drop off Dustin while Jonathan brought Will. “What’s up? How’s the middle of nowhere?”  
“I don’t know,” says Jonathan, because he doesn’t, and being around Steve always makes him a little lost anyway. Then: “Aren’t you here too?”

It’s not a good joke. He cringes a little as he says it. Steve laughs, big and loud. A strand of his hair bounces up and down as he does. Jonathan makes a valiant attempt not to look at it.

He says, “How have you been?”

“Oh, you know. Usual peaked-in-high-school bullshit. Video store. Robin.” Steve shrugs. “What about you? Take any good photos of any girls lately?” He quirks his mouth as he says it, but there’s a hardness to the thin press of his lips. He looks at Jonathan, and it’s a challenge.

Jonathan punches him.

There’s a pause. Heavy breathing. Then:

“Damn,” Steve says. “You’ve got better.”

He blinks. Shakes out his hand. “Oh. Thanks.”

“I’m gonna have a black eye and everything.”

“Shit,” Jonathan says, haltingly. He’s not quite sure what’s happening right now.

Steve laughs, breathy and truthful. “Yeah. I mean, no biggie, or anything. S’all okay.” It comes out sort of nasally.

Jonathan blinks, again. “You sure, man?”

Steve smiles like he isn’t going to have to show up to the video store tomorrow with a black eye. “Want to go do something?”

There’s just a second of hesitation. Then Jonathan gives up. Shrugs. “Sure.”

They go to a diner on the edge of town. The lights are dim and kind of crackly, and his beaten-up shoes make sticky noises against the floor that make him shiver. “Me and Robin come here all the time,” Steve is saying, and something about that makes Jonathan tense a little. What the fuck? He tries to shake it off, the way he shakes off his mom’s morning hugs, the way he shakes off his friends at school when they try to thump him on the back.

Steve’s graduated, now. Does he have any friends outside of him and Nancy (and, he supposes, Robin)? Maybe that’s why he’s been so quick to forgive.

Jonathan’s knuckles still ache. “Cool,” he says.

“Yeah,” Steve says quietly. A long silence builds between them. Steve pulls a face, and Jonathan must pull one in return because Steve starts to laugh. “Dude_,_” he says. “_Dude_.”

“What?” Steve is sort of mystifying to him. He always seems so uncomplicated: Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington, dickface. Maybe it’s the hair (The Hair). Maybe The Hair is like some sort of helmet, protecting him from being truly known. Or maybe that’s not true anymore.

That’s sort of why Robin confuses him so much. She doesn’t fit with the hair. Definitely not with The Hair.

“Oh,” says Steve. Deflating a little, he explains, “You just… pulled a really silly face just then.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He doesn’t know why he’s apologising.

“Don’t be. I like your face.”

“Um.”

Steve colours, and rubs at the back of his neck. “Haha,” he says, the poor imitation of a laugh. “Well…”

“Hiya, boys,” says the waitress. “What can I do for you today?”

Steve immediately says, “Pancakes, please.”

Jonathan orders a coffee. Watches as Steve slings an arm over the back of his chair and leans back, looking every inch The Hair. Jonathan leans back as well, trying to look as relaxed as Steve does. _He just _punched _this guy. _

“Do you always order pancakes at 4 pm?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. That’s a thing me and Robin do when she’s fighting with her mom.”

Again with the Robin thing. “Oh,” says Jonathan. He stares at the wall just above Steve’s head. It’s blank. White paint is fading into a brownish-yellow. There’s a stain in darker yellow. If he squints, he can make out the shape of a boy in the wall. It looks like he’s crying.

“You OK?” asks Steve.

“Oh, yeah.” What the hell? He’s got Nancy. Why does he care so much which girls Steve wants to fool around with? (Unless it’s not fooling around, he thinks, and the thought makes him nauseous even through his confusion). “Do you know, Nancy and I were…” but he’s finished speaking before he’s come up with a story to tell. “Never mind.”

Steve shrugs. “OK.” Then, suddenly, “Are you bored of Aliens yet?”

“Huh?” asks Jonathan.

“Just, Dustin’s tried to rent it about seven times this year. They’re watching it on loop, more or less. He rented it this week again; bet they wanted to watch it with Will, and then re-watch it so they can analyse the lore, or whatever.”

“Oh,” says Jonathan. “No, I haven’t even seen it, yet.”

“Well then, feel lucky. I’ve seen it about three times this month, and I think I’m going to go crazy. When I close my eyes, all I can hear is Aliens this, Aliens that—“

“I’m sorry,” interrupts Jonathan.

Steve’s eyebrows pull together. “For what?”

“Punching you. The joke you made—I deserved it. That was… that was fucking shitty of me. Even if I was looking for my brother.”

“Were you?”

The truth is terrifying. He says it anyway. “Not really.”

Steve smiles. “It’s cool, man. As long as you’ve talked to Nancy about it.”

“I have.” He has, but it wasn’t a great conversation. Too tight, like Nancy didn’t want to talk about it, although Jonathan thought if they didn’t their relationship would be too tense for words.

“Then we’re cool, man. It was a shittily timed joke. I knew you were sorry already.”

“Still. I deserved it.”

Quiet. Steve puts his hands on the table, palms up. “Look, man, it’s been a while. And I’d like—I want us to be friends.”

Something in Jonathan stutters. He ducks his head, says quietly: “I want that too.”

“Awesome,” Steve says. “So we’re friends, then?”

“I guess.”

The waitress comes with his coffee. “Another five minutes on the pancakes, OK?”

“No problem,” he says, smiling brightly at her.

Jonathan burns.

Jonathan burns, and he doesn’t know why he’s burning.

“So how’s Maine, then? Sounds fuckin’ boring, but then so does this place, I guess.”

Jonathan shrugs. “You know. It’s just a place. Not home, really.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Steve, and the way he looks says he really does.

“It’s like, you know, home is the people, not the place. So I have Mom and Will and Jane I guess, but I don’t…”

“Nancy?” Steve asks.

Maybe there’s room for the truth in here. He takes a deep breath. “And you.”

Steve blinks a little in shock. “Don’t we hate each other? Romantic rivals?”

“Let’s not… no. Didn’t you just say we were friends.”

Steve grins so wide Jonathan thinks his face might split apart. “Awesome, man! Then I can tell you about this guy who came into the store the other day – honestly the funniest guy I’ve ever seen.”

He’s a good storyteller, even if he gets a little distracted at times and goes off on long tangents. Nancy told him he and Dustin have a secret handshake. That they have fake lightsaber fights during his breaks.

All of this is very much not The Hair. Jonathan isn’t sure, really, what of Steve is. Only that the Steve sitting before him is somebody he wants to know. And he wants to know him a lot better.

Something in him unfurls. He finds himself leaning forward in interest, offering his own quips and jokes. Every time Steve guffaws at one of them, his face goes a little pinker. That’s how they’re sitting, pancakes half-eaten between them and coffee cold and long-forgotten, when Steve suddenly stops. He looks at Jonathan, expression full of something unidentifiable but heavy.

“It would have all been so much easier,” he says, quieter, “if he hadn’t been so goddamned hot.”

Jonathan leans backwards. He recognises the significance of those words, the heaviness of them, but he can’t place it. “What?” he says.

Steve winces. He looks so much smaller than he did a second ago.

Jonathan instantly hates himself. “Oh. Oh, okay.”

“I’m not, like, coming on to you or anything, man. I just thought you should… know.”

“What about Nancy?” he asks, because his default reaction around Steve is to be protective over her. “Was that…”

“No!” says Steve, so vehemently Jonathan is pushed backwards. “I would never…”

“And Robin?”

This makes Steve almost laugh. “We’re friends. Best friends. But that’s not… I love her more than anything in the world. But not like that.”

“Nancy said—“

“Nancy can get things wrong sometimes. It’s… girls and boys.”

That unsettles him for a moment. This is not Steve “The Hair”. This is just Steve. Just a boy.

Stiffly, he says, “Thank you for telling me.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, but he looks uncomfortable. Using his fingers, he tears off a bit of pancake and fiddles with it. This is all going so wrong. “Yeah. Well, I wanted you to know.”

“Girls and boys? I didn’t know that you could be that.”

“Me either. But Robin told me about it because I was getting all confused about Han Solo—“

“Han Solo? You have all the men in the world to crush on, and you pick Han Solo?”

“Leia’s not bad either,” defends Steve, but there’s a small smile there.

“Yeah, but Han? What a dick. You could’ve at least picked Luke. Come _on, _man.”

“Luke? Nah, he’s boring.”

“He’s got a fucking lightsaber, man. That’s not boring.” Will had been all over Luke when he first saw the film. Gushing about him at the dinner table, sticking drawings of him on his walls. Jonathan thinks he has much better taste than Steve.

“Nu-uh, man. When she says, ‘I love you,’ and then he says, ‘I know,’ that’s pretty much what invented romance. Come on, man!”

Jonathan huffs. “No! Wrong! That was a dickish thing to say, man. Come on!”

Steve bursts out laughing. “I’ll admit. Luke’s lightsaber is pretty cool.”

“Not as cool as your bat,” Jonathan says without thinking. “I mean…”

Steve laughs, quietly. It makes Jonathan stop speaking, to stare at him. Even with his terrible hair, he’s sort of beautiful. In a Han Solo kind of way. _What is happening?_

“I should probably go,” he says. “Mom will be worried.”

“OK,” says Steve, even as his shoulders sink.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

“Yeah.”

“And for… you know. Trusting me.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll see you around,” he finishes, and leaves. His steps are heavy, like he’s walking through sludge, like his entire body wants to stay with Steve.

“Jonathan?” Steve says, and he turns.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe don’t punch me, next time.”

A grin. “OK. I’ll try.”

Jonathan leaves. He has some serious thinking to do.

**Author's Note:**

> steve's crush: punches him  
steve: oh! no biggie. let's go on a date.


End file.
